Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Decoding query rejections.

I can concur with her anecdote about some queriers writing back to argue with a rejection, by the way. I've never understood why some people do this; trying to pick a fight with me is a poor way of demonstrating what a great working relationship we're likely to have.

Query etiquette wise, here's a bit of free advice I'm not sure I've given in this space before: please, please, please do not use your author website (the one linked in your query letter, or to your Google Plus account, if you use it) to blog about the query process. I tend not to look at queriers' sites unless I'm liking the pages you sent with the query, but if I see that you've been querying hundreds of agents for months, and you have a long post from a few weeks back about how your dream agent said no and you're on to Plan B, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

It also doesn't strike me as terribly professional; if you get in an argument with your publisher over the cover design, are you going to document that on the blog, too?

I know we live in a confessional age, but I think there are things you just don't want a permanent record of. Once it's on the Internet, it's no longer private-- and you can't take it back.